Designed to Learn

Using Design Thinking to Bring Purpose and Passion to the Classroom

Lindsay Portnoy

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781416628279
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Students become attentive, curious, and passionate about learning when they can see its relevance to their lives and when they're empowered to use that learning to solve problems that matter. Regardless of the subject or grade level you teach, you can infuse your instruction with the meaning students crave by implementing design thinking. Design thinking prompts students to consider: "I've learned it. Now what am I going to do with it?"

In Designed to Learn, cognitive scientist and educator Lindsay Portnoy shares the amazing teaching and learning that take place in design thinking classrooms. To set the stage, she provides easy-to-implement strategies, classroom examples, and clear tools to scaffold the processes of inquiry, discovery, design, and reflection. Because formative assessment is crucial to the process, Portnoy includes sample assessments that measure student learning and ensure that learners take the lead in their own learning.

As the author guides you through the five elements of design thinking (understand and empathize, identify and research, communicate to ideate, prototype and test, and iterate and reflect), you'll learn how to support students as they- Use the content you teach to solve a problem in their community or in the world around them.
- Isolate a concern for their designed solution to address.
- Communicate ideas and provide valid reasoning for potential solutions.
- Prototype a solution and test it.
- Revise their design for maximum impact and reflect on the process.

Equipped with the strategies and supports in Designed to Learn, teachers will be able to ensure that learning in their classrooms is visible, student-centered, and measurable—by design.

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Chapter 1

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Finding Purpose in Learning

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We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: We have the power to imagine better.

J. K. Rowling

Think about the last time you learned something new. Did you pick up a nonfiction book about deep space to pursue your latent passion for understanding life beyond our atmosphere? Perhaps you taught yourself to knit as part of a community effort to send blankets to those left devastated after a natural disaster. Maybe you decided to take a crack at crafting your own artisanal brews at home.

What prompted you to engage in this new learning? The why is the impetus that drove you to learn to speak a new language, play an instrument, or code long after your days as a student. This drive fuels your sense of purpose and passion, according to researcher Dan Pink (2011); it motivates you to engage your innate curiosity in the pursuit and application of new knowledge. Creative learning strategist Barbara Bray (2015) suggests that "defining your why" may very well be the key to unlocking your true potential in learning and life.

Now think about how you approached learning that something new, or, more specifically:

• If you got stuck, where did you seek support?
  • — How did you identify sources for research?
  • — What were the attributes of those sources that rendered them reliable?
• How did you know when you understood a concept?
  • — For example, how did you distinguish between concepts like a purl and a knit stitch? How did you identify how much yeast to pitch in the fermenter?
  • — When were you able to communicate your understanding to your friend, partner, or child?
• At what point were you ready to move beyond learning to doing?

As you learn and apply new knowledge that is meaningful to your life, you're already enacting elements of design thinking. The goal of this book is to act as a primer as you set the stage for design thinking in your classroom by providing simple strategies and clear tools to scaffold the iterative processes of inquiry, discovery, design, and reflection.

The elements of design thinking presented here invite students into the flexible process of learning and creating together, with you as their guide. Throughout each element, you'll see how to create more dynamic assessments that demonstrate and inform student learning. By doing so, you'll share some of the responsibility of assessment with your students to develop their self-regulation and metacognitive skills. Perhaps most important, you'll spend more time answering questions and less time in front of a classroom of students, their eyes glazed over.

Roll up your sleeves. It's about to get wonderfully messy.

Shifts That Have Paved the Way

Traditional education paradigms were initially modeled after needs for industrialization (i.e., factories, bells, siloed content), whereas needs for what Klaus Schwab (2016) has called the fourth industrial revolution—in which new technologies will fuse the physical, digital, and biological worlds on a grand scale—require interdisciplinary approaches to learning. Here, students are engaged in multimodal inquiry through holistic units of active learning and deep inquiry. Our education system isn't failing—it's changing.

Shifts in Pedagogy, Tools, and Content

Cultivating our youngest citizens to take on the important work of the future requires a shift in the way we teach them today. Teachers who are leading this change have adopted novel pedagogies, tools, and content to meet the needs of their students and set them on pathways to success.

Pedagogies. Foundational skills are necessary for success, but rote tasks have taken a back seat to instruction that cultivates deep and powerful learning driven by student curiosity. We're witnessing a shift in curriculum, spurred on by the need for students to synthesize important concepts; learning that was once a mile wide and an inch deep is giving way to learning that is a mile deep and an inch wide.

Measuring students' knowledge acquisition has also undergone a shift. Teachers scaffold formative assessments to drive student work forward; at the same time, formative feedback helps identify where students struggle and need support. When educators share the responsibility of assessment with their students, students become more self-reflective, independent learners who achieve greater agency and voice within the classroom.

Educators increasingly are encouraging student autonomy in problem solving. Students must demonstrate content knowledge in novel ways, given our deeper understanding of what it means, for example, to learn science. Digital and more traditional forms of learning and assessment support clearer communications between students and teachers because they enable educators to address students' questions as they arise, fostering more consistent growth and learning. Digital tools also enable educators to leverage their social networks to build, grow, and share their practice with a global community as they celebrate the diverse learning happening in our schools each day.

Tools. Technological advances offer novel affordances to engage learners and enable teachers to quickly collect feedback and pivot on instruction. Educators can get a baseline reading of student understanding and maximize class time by focusing on areas that need strengthening or on those that are innately interesting to learners. Alone, these are simply tools; in the hands of thoughtful educators, they become transformative.

For example, with a single smartphone and one piece of paper per student, teachers use tools like Plickers to conduct formative assessments. In classrooms that have gone one-to-one—that is, where every student has a computer or device—teachers collect feedback throughout instruction with tools like Nearpod or Socrative. What's more, those with access to smartphones and to Google Cardboard, a virtual reality platform, can now travel the globe and to the outer limits of the universe to experience what was once relegated to the pages of a textbook. These tools provide a template for rich experiences that enable students to talk with experts around the globe and that allow for dynamic feedback to drive inquiry.

Content. Students live rich lives outside the classroom; the design thinking process encourages them to bring this richness and variety into the classroom. As students grow foundational content knowledge (hard skills), they develop soft skills, such as working collaboratively in teams, taking the perspective of others, honing skills for solving complex problems, and demonstrating mindfulness. These skills help students feel connected to their classroom community and to the world at large. They also enable them to navigate the systems around them and find meaningful solutions to the pressing problems they encounter along the way.

Shifts in Cultural Tools

The cognitive theorist Lev Vygotsky (1978) once posited human learning as co-constructed within the specific social and cultural norms of the learner. The difference between what learners can do on their own and what they can accomplish with the help of a more knowledgeable other is what he referred to as their zone of proximal development. According to his research, a more knowledgeable other could scaffold student understanding to reach the upper limits of a student's zone through the use of cultural tools.

What Vygotsky might refer to as cultural tools—be they language or something more concrete, like an abacus or a calculator—are already changing the ways we engage with the world. Visionary educators who leverage new tools are curating content so their students receive relevant, timely, and developmentally appropriate information. When students see themselves as makers and creators of content, conversations arise about the multiple perspectives embedded in each new literary passage, article, or chapter. These shifts have set the stage for pedagogies like design thinking to emerge, where educators and students work collaboratively and invite deeper inquiry for understanding.

The Science Behind Design Thinking

Before diving into an overview of the elements of design thinking, it's important to note that student and teacher interests are central to purposeful learning. A teacher is no longer "the sage on the stage" but rather "the guide on the side." This shift is key to fostering student autonomy and preparing students for the knowledge economy. We're born scientists, experimenting on the world around us to help us learn, change, and grow. The new tools we're bringing into the education system will automate the busywork that has monopolized teachers' time for so long and will free up educators to collaborate and innovate with their students.

A long history of learning science underlies the model of design thinking; it's rooted deep in constructivism, with nods from motivational research and various theories of learning. The teacher-led counterpart to design thinking resides in the Understanding by Design^® (UbD) framework (Wiggins & McTighe, 2011), which can be beneficial in getting you started with your first design thinking project. The UbD model guides teachers in developing curriculum by identifying the major learning outcomes students should demonstrate to show mastery. It then requires teachers to design backward to craft lessons that will scaffold instruction toward the learning goals.

Similar to teachers in a UbD context, teachers in design thinking classrooms use standards-based content to determine the big ideas that students should understand during each unit. However, distinct from UbD and approaches like problem-based learning, design thinking puts the big ideas first by asking students to seek out and identify problems. It then works backward to identify information students must master as they design solutions that address problems or opportunities in the world around them.

As you'll read in subsequent chapters, while work toward the designed solutions unfolds, the learning outcomes become more than the sum of their parts. A unit on persuasive writing may transform into a multimedia social justice movement, or a unit on coding may culminate in a community-wide robot wedding. As students work to design solutions, the very nature of instruction and assessment shifts to incorporate related topics from across the curriculum in exciting and unforeseen ways.

Teachers in design thinking classrooms cultivate experiential learning that is standards based but student driven, distinct from transmission models of education (Richardson, 2005). Critics of constructivist learning suggest that student misconceptions are reinforced during student-led inquiry, yet the opposite is true in design thinking classrooms (Sewell, 2002). In these classrooms, students are called on to explain their understanding. Through iterative design and formative feedback, student understanding is made visible, and teachers can easily identify and address misconceptions.

As students begin to see how their designed solutions may affect the world around them, they learn through active inquiry alongside peers, educators, and members of their local and global community. This is the 21st century's version of a cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989), where giving students a sense of voice and agency in their learning helps them take on roles in their communities.

What emerges from the process is a sense of purpose that propels students forward as co-creators of knowledge (Pink, 2011). As students apply the knowledge and skills they've acquired, they make sense of the world around them and learn how to transfer their knowledge to solving new problems. Students begin to see knowledge as malleable. What's more, they see themselves as contributors to the knowledge economy.

Finally, design thinking enables students to see failure as a part of learning and teachers to see setbacks as opportunities for growth. Providing students with needed scaffolds and strategies along the way not only boosts their beliefs about themselves as learners but also enables them to challenge the nature of knowledge and knowing (Dweck, 2017). The tools that students learn and use in the design thinking classroom will benefit them in their other classes and in their life outside school.

The Five Elements of Design Thinking

Each element of the design thinking process is grounded in standards-based learning, rich with embedded formative assessment, and ripe for developing student voice and engagement in the classroom. It's important to remember that the process is fluid and doesn't always follow a linear path. In a sense, design thinking is counter to the mile-wide and inch-deep curriculum in which students accumulate facts and figures while they prepare for summative assessment. Instead, design thinking asks students to consider what questions their understanding can help solve and supports students as they dig deeper to understand the root cause of problems in the world.

Each element has a guiding question. The process of answering is student driven to create intrinsically motivating learning experiences that meet the diverse interests of the learners in our classrooms.

Element 1: Understand and Empathize

In this first element of the design thinking process, students deepen their knowledge through thoughtful assessment, and they exercise empathy and other key social-emotional skills so crucial to student success. By taking perspective and looking more closely at the multiple connections within and among issues, students get acquainted with the complexity of the problems they'll be identifying later on. This introduction to messiness aids in normalizing failure for them, which will be helpful as they begin to test their own proposed solutions to problems.

Understand. Developing understanding is a necessary first step that enables learners to apply their knowledge, but it may also serve as a place where design challenges take hold.

For example, one day after lunch, my students returned to our class to find groups of four desks pushed together, with a tub of water in the center of each group. Also on the grouped tables were rectangular pieces of card stock, parchment paper, pipe cleaners, tape, wooden beads, and tin foil. Not new to my shenanigans, the students looked at me questioningly: What now? I shared the prompt on the chalkboard: "Create an object that will float on water while holding wooden beads."

After a few minutes of playing around with these new tools, my kids got busy building structures sturdy enough to float while holding beads. I watched as they created contraptions and tested them in the basins of water. Fifteen minutes later, four of the groups had come up with a boatlike design; others were either catching on or riffing on successful designs to build their own boats.

I invited students to demonstrate their creations for the class. I also asked them to predict how many wooden beads each boat might hold and to note their findings on the board using tally marks, but without the usual diagonal line that indicates a completed set of five. As I exaggerated the painstaking process of counting each mark one by one, a student questioned why I didn't count by 10. This was a primer into using tally marks and, later, bar graphs; it also foreshadowed a lesson we would visit later in the year when talking about surface area, mass, and weight.

Empathize. Students take on multiple perspectives as they develop empathy or compassion while designing solutions. Teachers can provide tools and processes to aid in this work.

As students work to consider the needs of others, they broaden their worldview, step outside themselves, and learn to observe and listen to others. They learn how to apply their foundational knowledge to helping other people or solving problems in the world.

Element 2: Identify and Research

This phase begins with students isolating the opportunity or concern that their designed solution will address. Students then move into research, where they work to gain a deeper insight into the content.

Identify. Based on understanding content and empathizing with the user, students identify a single problem that their knowledge can help solve. In this way, students dive deeper ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise for Designed to Learn
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Finding Purpose in Learning
• Chapter 2. Teacher and Student Roles in the Design Thinking Classroom
• Chapter 3. How Not to Recreate the Wheel: Same Objectives, Different Pathways
• Chapter 4. Understand and Emphasize: Stepping Back Before Stepping In
• Chapter 5. Identify and Research: Symptom or Root Cause?
• Chapter 6. Communicate to Ideate: Pulling Together to Design Innovative Solutions
• Chapter 7. Prototype and Test: The Messy Path Forward
• Chapter 8. Iterate and Reflect: Reinforcing the Power of Formative Feedback
• Chapter 9. Applying Knowledge to Practice: Isn't That the Point?
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright